


Time To Save The Day

by alkjira



Series: Fix-it (!) December [5]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Crack, Fix-It, Gen, Not Serious, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-03
Updated: 2014-12-03
Packaged: 2018-02-28 01:04:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2713268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alkjira/pseuds/alkjira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“And none of you can see it?” Bilbo asked. He pointed to the furry little creature and it responded by yawning and curling up into a ball. “Are you really sure that you can’t?”</p><p>No one would look him in the eye.</p><p>“I’m not crazy,” Bilbo protested. “I’m not. There’s a hamster. Right there.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time To Save The Day

**Author's Note:**

> (Of course I don't think that hamsters makes everything bette-  
> OH WHO AM I KIDDING)
> 
> This is the story of how hamsters save the Company and quite possibly Middle Earth. It's CRACK. And quite possibly it doesn't make sense.  
> You have been warned.

Bilbo wondered if lying would be better. The hamster wasn’t doing much of anything after all, just, erm, lying. There. As in resting. Bilbo was fairly sure it couldn’t talk.

“It's, um, still here,” he said finally.

“We guessed as much,” Bofur said when no one else offered any comment. “Otherwise you'd not have taken that long to reply.”  
  
“And none of you can see it?” Bilbo asked. He pointed to the furry little creature and it responded by yawning and curling up into a ball. “Are you really sure that you can’t?”  
  
No one would look him in the eye.  
  
“I’m not crazy,” Bilbo protested. “I’m not. There’s a hamster. Right _there_.”  
  
Gandalf cleared his throat. “Hobbits are not prone to delusions. There was an incident with a rat once, but despite the similarity; both rats and hamsters being rodents-“  
  
The hamster uncurled enough to glare at Gandalf with one beady eye.  
  
“I couldn’t agree more,” Bilbo muttered.  
  
“-turned out to be a simple misunderstanding about which mushrooms that one should fry with a bit of butter.”  
  
“Did _you_ eat any mushrooms, Bilbo?” Fíli asked as Kíli poked the air a few inches left of where the hamster was actually lying.  
  
“No,” Bilbo said and folded his arms over his chest. “I did not.”  
  
The hamster yawned.  
  
-  
  
A week later the hamster was still around, and it had found a friend.  
  
“There’s two of them now!” Bilbo moaned as he joined Bifur and Bombur by the campfire. “And no, that doesn’t mean I’m twice as crazy, if that was what you were thinking.”

The hamsters made small complaining sounds. “I don’t care if you’re insulted,” Bilbo said, glaring down at the two animals. “It’s not like I’ve _asked_ to be haunted by two furballs.”  
  
“They talk now?” Bombur asked, a little warily.  
  
“No,” Bilbo grumped. “But I’d not be surprised if they’d start.”  
  
Bifur laughed and said something in that unfamiliar Dwarven tongue before leaning forward and holding out his hand, level with the ground and palm up. The ears of one of the hamsters twitched and it scurried forward, hesitating slightly before climbing up into Bifur’s hand.

“It’s- it’s sitting in your hand now,” Bilbo said slowly. “Do you- can you feel it?”  
  
The Dwarf shook his head no, but he still raised his hand, slowly and gently, bringing it up before his face.  
  
The hamster and Dwarf looked at each other, similar looks of contemplation on their faces, then the hamster appeared to shrug and it dove into Bifur’s beard.  
  
The Dwarf did not appear to notice, instead continuing to look at his palm even as his beard rustled and moved and squeaked quite happily.          

-  
  
Bilbo had begun to wonder if he wasn’t losing the grasp on reality after all. But it wasn’t because he was seeing hamsters that no one else could see, or touch; well, couldn't touch knowing that they were touching them anyway.  
  
No, he was going to go crazy because he was seeing hamsters that seemed to have their hearts set on nesting inside the nearest available beard.  
  
The one that had taken a liking to Bifur seemed to have found his beard a _marvellous_ place to settle down because it had refused to come back out, instead he had decided to invite a few friends.

Now there weren’t only two hamsters around. It was at least thirty. And they’d all made camp in someone’s beard. It was enough to drive a Hobbit mad it was, not being able to look at his companions without seeing small dark eyes look back at him from inside their beards. And there was also the occasional squeak and sneeze, which didn’t exactly help Bilbo’s composure.  
  
“Gandalf, there has got to be _something_ you can do.”  
  
“About something I can’t see, nor touch?” Gandalf shook his head. “If they are here it is a power greater than mine who has put them on this path.”  
  
“Path?” Bilbo spluttered. “They’re not on a _path_ , they’re in beards. Yours too!”  
  
Gandalf looked annoyingly serene as two small furry heads popped out of his beard to favour Bilbo with a displeased look.  
  
-

  
Eventually though, after several very trying weeks, it turned out that the hamsters did have some use after all.

-  
  
They’d been running away from a pack of Orcs when the hamsters had suddenly decided to start running _towards_ the Orcs and-  
  
“Hamsters are not supposed to be poisonous!” Bilbo said accusingly.  
  
“Did the Orcs eat them!?” Glóin panted, weapon still raised and ready to attack in case it was still needed.

“What? No! They bit them! The hamsters. The hamsters bit them! The Orcs.”  
  
“The hamsters bit the Orcs?” Nori looked at the ground which was now liberally littered with fallen Orcs. “Well, in that case, they’re venomous, not poisonous.“  
  
“Does that really matter!?” Bilbo hissed.

“At least none of us think you’ve been eating mushrooms now,” Kíli offered. He nudged one of the Orcs with his boot. “Huh, they’re still breathing.”  
  
In the distance they could hear the sound of horns.  
  
“Elves,” Dwalin said, head tilted to the side.  
  
Thorin looked contemplatively between the unconscious Orcs and the direction from where the horns had come. “Elves. Burglar, if they come here, do you think your hamsters-“  
  
“Thorin Oakenshield!” Gandalf thundered. “You are not about to suggest that we poison-“  
  
“But they weren’t poisonous,” Fíli whispered to Ori.  
  
The scribe shrugged. “You can’t exactly venom someone, can you?”  
  
“Common is a strange language,” the blond sighed.  
  
“They’re not _my_ hamsters!” Bilbo protested.  
  
Meanwhile all the hamsters had gotten bored with the conversation and was now running around trying to find if any tasty flowers grew anywhere nearby. They did, but they were covered in Orc. The hamsters were not pleased.  
  
-  
  
The Elves didn’t know anything about the hamsters either. And they couldn’t see them. And for some reason the Dwarfs got really smug once Bilbo told them that the hamsters didn’t really seem to like the Elves. Likely due to their lack of beards. Which didn’t make sense as Bilbo didn’t have a beard either, but when he pointed this out to Bofur:  
  
“You’ve got some nice hair on your feet though,” Bofur nodded and patted his shoulder. The hamster clinging to one of his braids nodded.  
  
Wonderful.  
  
-  
  
The hamsters were wary of the Stone Giants, but they happily bit the Goblins, only there was just too many of them and Bilbo ended up taking a tumble off one of the rickety rope bridges and down into the deep.  
  
He landed safe and sound in a huge patch of mushrooms. Hamsters raining down around him, also managing to keep themselves from going splat against the hard ground.  
  
The Goblin that had fallen with them hadn’t been so lucky, and it was about to get unluckier still.  
  
“I’m beginning to think I might be seeing things after all,” Bilbo murmured to the hamsters after the strange creature had disappeared out of sight, dragging the Goblin behind it.  
  
Crawling out of the mushroom patch, Bilbo’s gaze were caught by something glinting on the ground. A golden ring? How… peculiar.

He reached out for the ring, but just before he could take it-  
  
“Did you just _eat_ it?” he asked the white hamster that _had_ in fact just decided to eat a golden ring.  
  
The hamster nodded and looked a little sick. Then it hiccupped.  
  
“Unbelievable,” Bilbo muttered and gently picked the hamster up, putting it in his pocket where it curled up into a little ball. “Bombur’s been trying to feed you ever since he started to trust that you were actually here. And you’ve kept disappointing him by refusing. And _now_ you decide that you’re hungry enough to eat metal? What is _wrong_ with you?”  
  
-  
  
Following the hamsters Bilbo found his way out of the mountain, and he spent some time panicking about what he was going to do _now_ , as well as worrying about the ring-eating hamster as it simply did not seem to feel very well.  
  
But before he could decide on a plan Gandalf and the Dwarfs came running out of the same tunnel Bilbo had emerged from, with enough speed that Bilbo thought for sure that the Goblin’s must be chasing them.  
  
And they had been,  but Goblin’s did not like sun it turned out. Which was fortunate. And unfortunate at the same time as the sun was going _down_.  
  
They managed to get some distance away, only to stumble upon a pack of Orcs.  
  
What a _lovely_ way to end the day.

-  
  
Thorin stared in disbelief at Azog the white Orc where he lay fallen on the ground. “Thank you,” he said, voice hoarse and gravelly. The hamsters squeaked happily in reply and Bilbo knees decided that now was a good time to have a bit of a sit-down.

  
Then he would yell at moronic Dwarfs.

-

When the giant eagles showed up everyone looked to Gandalf, but the wizard merely looked confused and seemed to be genuinely innocent for once.  
  
Bilbo never saw how one of the hamsters nodded at a nearby butterfly.  
  
-  
  
As they were dropped off on a towering tower of a cliff, Bilbo noticed that the white ring-eating hamster was no longer curled up in his pocket.

Distraught that he might have dropped it as they flew with the eagles he scurried around the cliff, trying to find the little one. But he did not succeed.

Unbeknownst to Bilbo, the hamster who had eaten the One Ring was now on its way to Mordor, riding on the back of Gwaihir the Windlord. It would take days for them to get there, and by that time Bilbo and the others were thanking Beorn for his hospitality, ready to depart for Mirkwood.  
  
“What’s that?” Bofur asked, staring at the sky and the Company and Beorn (and a few sheep) turned their head to look where he was pointing.  
  
A strangely shaped cloud had sailed up to cover a large part of the sky to the south-east. And it seemed to glow with a red-golden light.  
  
Neither of the people standing outside Beorn’s knew it, but the hamster had coughed up the evil bit of jewellery just as they were flying over Mount Doom, thus destroying Sauron and his power and causing mount Doom to erupt and spit out a huge ash cloud that would linger on the horizon for days.  
  
(And don’t worry, the hamster recovered completely from having that nasty thing in its poor, poor stomach.)  
  
Gandalf removed his hat, grey eyes locked on the sky and a strange expression on his face, and somehow Bilbo wasn’t even surprised when he saw that no fewer than three hamsters had been sitting beneath the Wizard’s hat.  
  
-

  
Shortly after they'd seen the cloud Gandalf declared that he urgently needed to bugger off elsewhere (not with those exact words, but that was the general message) and thus it came to pass that Bilbo and the Dwarfs were on their own as they entered Mirkwood.  
  
No one was particularly happy with that, especially not the hamsters as they tried to explained to Bilbo that he and the Dwarfs were indeed _not_ on their own! But Bilbo thought that they just missed Gandalf and his beard and didn't really pay much attention to the squeaking.  
  
-  
  
The hamsters hated the spiders, but refused to bite them. Though they were really good at gnawing through webs, and all in all Bilbo felt that they were much better off with the hamsters than they’d otherwise would have been.  
  
They could not bite rivers either, and they did not bite any Elves, despite what some Kings who should not be named would have wanted and might have requested.  
  
-  
  
The hamsters continued to not be very fond of Elves, to the Dwarfs’ continued delight, and Bilbo pretended not to hear when Thorin muttered requests about someone nibbling just a _little_ on Thranduil. It sounded even more wrong when he put it like that.  
  
-  
  
The escape to Lake-town was wet, horrible, and did Bilbo mention wet?  
  
The hamsters rode down the river in two barrels of their own and as the stream finally calmed and everyone got washed up against the shore the hamster barrels tipped over and a small flood of grumpy and wet furballs trotted out of them.  
  
Their grumbling was really loud and for the first time the Dwarfs seemed to be able to hear them. Or hear _something_ at least, because all of them kept glancing in the hamsters general direction.  
  
And when a Man called Bard showed up he did much the same.  
  
-  
  
“You can see them?” Bilbo breathed as he saw how Bard’s children were blatantly staring at the crowd of grumpy hamsters having fluffed themselves up in front of the fire place.  
  
“Yeah?” the boy said. “Why wouldn’t we be-“  
  
“Oh, thank you!” Bilbo exclaimed and pulled the lad in for a hug. “ _Thank you_!”  
  
-  
  
There were many theories offered as for why Bilbo and three human children were the only ones who could see hamsters.  
  
None of them any good.  
  
-  
  
After they'd found the hidden door and entered the mountain there was a small problem as the hamsters realised that they couldn’t bite through Dragon scale.  
  
Perhaps small was the wrong word, because the Dragon Smaug was quite frankly the largest thing Bilbo had ever seen.  
  
But they wouldn’t have been hamsters if they’d allowed a thing like that to stop them.  
  
-  
  
“What _are_ you doing?” Bilbo asked as the hamsters all stuffed a golden coin in their mouths and ran off.

-  
  
What they _weren_ ’t doing was planning to try and kill a Dragon with molten gold. Because as Dragons liked both gold and hot and fiery things, that would be a horrible, horrible plan. Obviously.  
  
No, they knew that Smaug knew every last bit of his treasure, and would know that even one coin was missing, never mind close to a hundred, because that was how many hamsters were now around.

Running over the treasure covered floor the hamsters were almost at the gates to the halls outside the treasure chambers when everything rumbled and Smaug came bursting out from beneath his stolen wealth.  
  
The hamsters led him on a merry chase as he could not see, nor hear them. But he _knew_ that someone was trying to steal from him, and he knew that they were many.  
  
“Thieves!!!” echoed down the hallways. “Stealing my treasure!”  
  
-  
  
They kept it up for hours. Bilbo and the Dwarfs ended up having a picnic outside on the slopes of Erebor, the ground beneath them occasionally rumbling when Smaug got particularly upset.  
  
-  
  
Bilbo had almost fallen asleep when the ground rumbled again and the front gates to Erebor were violently thrown open by an immensely irate Dragon. The Dwarfs all jumped to their feet, weapons drawn, but Smaug paid them no mind as he glared at the ground, head almost pressed against it with his long neck curved in a very uncomfortable-looking way.  
  
“Thieves,” he hissed, deep voice hoarse from all the shouting that had been done. And even though the hamsters were too far away to be seen, Bilbo assumed that they headed north since that was what Smaug was doing.  
  
And that was the last anyone ever saw of him.  
  
Okay that is a lie. The last anyone ever saw of him was when he trampled down a few hundred  Orc camps on the journey north, but it wasn’t like those Orcs was in a state to tell anyone about it afterwards.  
  
It was however not the last time anyone saw the hamsters.  
  
-  
  
“You’re back!” Bilbo exclaimed and dropped down to his knees, hamsters crowding around him. “I’ve been so worried.”  
  
The hamsters squeaked and climbed all over him, and Bilbo laughed as their whiskers and fur tickled him. “That’s not to say I’ve missed you though, annoying furballs.”  
  
Balin cleared his throat and Bilbo looked up. “Oh, I do beg your pardon.”  
  
Thorin, also kneeling, but kneeling because he’d been about to be properly crowned as Erebor’s king, rolled his eyes.  
  
The rest of the Company were busy squinting, trying to see the hamsters.  
  
“I think I see one of them,” Kíli said, crossing his eyes. “If I go like this.”  
  
The rest of the Dwarfs gathered in the throne room, and there were quite a few of them, looked terribly confused.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're sitting there going "what the fuck did I just read" I'm pretty sure that's normal.


End file.
